Billboard Liberation Front vs. ATT + NSA

The Billboard Liberation Front today announced a major new advertising
improvement campaign executed on behalf of clients AT&T and the National
Security Agency. Focusing on billboards in the San Francisco area, this
improvement action is designed to promote and celebrate the innovative
collaboration of these two global communications giants.

We like beer. I’m particular to Porter and Stout. Milton likes Rye though.

Topically: Not only do we make the posters such that they don’t permanently damage the sign, we always leave a bottle of scotch for the poor sods who have to dis-improve our work. There was a $60 bottle of Macallen 12 yo. up there right below the “NSA” portion

Teresa wrote:“However, Sedgequill is wrong about deliberate humiliation and befuddling. There is no such intent. Disemvowelling is intended to deprecate the text in question, keep passers-by from automatically reading it, be legible to those who are willing to put some work into it, and instruct onlookers about what is and isn’t valued in this forum.”

Teresa, to stop the casual reader mistaking moderation for server error, maybe when a comment is disemvouled, it could also be tagged with:

“Disemvouled by a moderator” at the beginning. You could even have ‘Disemvouled’ linked to wiki or some other explanation of Boing Boing policy

Up until now, I thought it was either a server error or a paranoid technique used by the commenter to disrupt searches by NSA and such.

@BLF folks (CJDESODA, Milton)
If I was in San Francisco, I’d happily oblige. Know of any goings on in the Boston area? Feel like dropping in for a few words on our blog about art and activism? I’d love to do an interview!

I got jerked around into wondering what happened to Eiconoclast’s account and altered comment. I did not come to boingboing omniscient and hence I was unaware of the personal proclivities of boingboing editors and administrators.

A visitor to boingboing should not find it necessary, as I did, to research the practice of removing vowels from words, learn that the practice is called disemvoweling, and find in search results a link to a Wikipedia entry or another source that happens to describe boingboing behaviorâ€”although disemvowelizing as practiced at boingboing censures more than it censors.

Having fun using disemvowelizing to humiliate some commenters while befuddling and inconveniencing readers who don’t know what’s going on may feel like a wonderful thing to those doing it. I’ll no longer expect to find wonderful things, or administrative honesty and civility, at boingboing.

For starters, you don’t know what the hell the billboards are talking about unless you’ve seen the TV ads. Plus, the TV ads feature such non-believable characters that I can’t help but think the ad campaign is designed to convince people that “AT&T if for somebody else, not people like me!”

A visitor to boingboing should not find it necessary, as I did, to research the practice of removing vowels from words, learn that the practice is called disemvoweling, and find in search results a link to a Wikipedia entry or another source that happens to describe boingboing behavior

The other way to find out is by having it happen to you, so your method sounds much pleasanter to me.

Who is the kinder teacher? She who lets the student discover consequences – or the other, who misleads by coddling?

BoingBoing is a perilous place. At any moment,without warning, your opinion can be DISAGREED WITH! Just like that! Even heathens and infidels lurk here. There is no spelling correction! Can you imagine that? As for civility… well, let me assure you, they are ALL savages here.

For the strong,BB can be place of learning and sustenance though. But only the fittest survive.

Sedgequill’s right on one point: we should have a general statement on moderation. I’ve been trying to write one for some time now.

However, Sedgequill is wrong about deliberate humiliation and befuddling. There is no such intent. Disemvowelling is intended to deprecate the text in question, keep passers-by from automatically reading it, be legible to those who are willing to put some work into it, and instruct onlookers about what is and isn’t valued in this forum.